General Strike Centenary Commemorations

Tim Roca Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd June 2026 Commons Chamber

[Tim Roca (Macclesfield) (Lab)]

I am really grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham Northfield (Laurence Turner) for securing this important Adjournment debate. I was very excited a few weeks ago when he told me that he had secured it. He has spoken really eloquently about the importance of the general strike to labour history. I was reminded, when he told me he was applying for the debate, of the quote from AJ Cook, who said:

“Not a penny off the day, not a minute on the day”.

As my hon. Friend powerfully pointed out, the defeat of the miners in that strike led, effectively, to an attempt to crush working people in this country. That is very powerfully illustrated in “The Road to Wigan Pier” by George Orwell, who paints the picture of what the consequences of the failure of the strike were for working people. It reminds us that many of the freedoms and liberties we enjoy today hang on a timeline of solidarity that was won by the trade union movement. I am proud to be a Labour MP, from a party that was born from the trade union movement, as I know are many of my colleagues.

I want to take a moment to honour a woman whose name deserves to stand alongside others who might be mentioned today: Mary Turpin of Macclesfield. When the marchers passed through Macclesfield on their way to London during the general strike, she did not watch from the sidelines—she got stuck in. She organised soup kitchens, set up feeding centres for children and prepared thousands of family parcels for the locked-out miners in Biddulph. This was a woman who at nine years old had worked in one of the Macclesfield silk mills, so she knew in her bones what it meant to go without. It was not an abstract political cause for her; it was a real calling.

Mary went on to become Macclesfield’s first female magistrate, its first female alderwomen and almost its first female mayor. We owe it to her memory, and to the countless ordinary women like her whose quiet, relentless solidarity held communities together, to speak of them in debates such as this one today.